It Still Moves

For her book, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music, longtime Pitchfork staffer Amanda Petrusich hoped to nudge our collective notions of "Americana" by looking at the ways in which Americana music-- rural, indigent, acoustic music-- has evolved and endured, and how those changes may or may not reflect a new American landscape.

For her book, It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music, longtime Pitchfork staffer Amanda Petrusich hoped to nudge our collective notions of "Americana" by looking at the ways in which Americana music-- rural, indigent, acoustic music-- has evolved and endured, and how those changes may or may not reflect a new American landscape. It Still Moves is very much a travelogue, focused primarily on southern landscapes (Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi, the regions which birthed country, folk, and blues music), but it also looks closely at the ways in which Americana has been perverted, reinvented, and, to an extent, reinvigorated by new (and sometimes aggressively avant-garde) artists. This particular section ends in Brattleboro, Vermont-- the site of the first (and, to date, the last) Brattleboro Free-Folk Festival.

From the chapter "The New, Weird, Hyphenated America: Indie-Folk and the Next American Revival". Parts of this excerpt originally appeared on Pitchfork Media and in Paste magazine.

Trying to isolate the cultural moment when Williamsburg, Brooklyn, went from titillating to exhausting is like trying to deﬁne the tipping point wherein employing a piece of urban slang or quoting from a certain ﬁlm shifts from being relatively witty to completely humiliating. Williamsburg itself "jumped the shark" (check the multilevel irony!) at some indeﬁnable moment between 1998 and 2006: After a dizzying shower of newspaper trend pieces, condo developments, $4200-a-month lofts, and glossy photo shoots, the neighborhood lost its artistic cache, becoming less the terrain of trailblazing bohemians and more a haven for bond traders with iPods. Williamsburg's fall from grace was so inevitable-- so patent and well-documented and agreed-upon-- that it's a cliché to even point it out. By now, barbs about trucker hats and faux-vintage T-shirts and pre-frayed Converse are cringingly ubiquitous. Williamsburg is a cartoon.

Tonight, I'm standing in the drained shallow end of McCarren Park Pool, a former public swim-center dug and christened in the summer of 1936, the eighth of 11 city pools powered by FDR's Depressionﬁghting Works Progress Administration. Situated on the southern edge of Greenpoint, on the precipice of neighboring Williamsburg, the pool was emptied in 1984 but has since been (contentiously) adopted by the radio monolith Clear Channel, which donated $250,000 to the City Parks Foundation to allow for basic structural improvements (and, depressingly, the whitewashing of grafﬁti) and outﬁtted the pool with a big, fancy stage. The pool cuts a massive valley; it was originally intended to ﬂoat nearly seven thousand swimmers. I will later read on Shadowlands.net-- a "ghosts and hauntings" website, the entry to which requires clicking on a graphic of a sword jammed into a stone-- that a little girl drowned in the pool and is still "seen roaming the area at night, calling for help." For me, the fog of haunting hangs thick over much of north Brooklyn, although it seems to have less to do with paranormal schisms and more to do with too much change, too fast, by young people culturally predisposed to celebrate grit. Williamsburg and Greenpoint are spared the ﬂower boxes and reﬁnished exteriors of equally (if differently) gentriﬁed neighborhoods like Park Slope, and here, dirty vinyl siding and rusted tin awnings are reminders of a past that's been consumed and commodiﬁed by the present. I can't decide which revolution-- the one that erases all ugliness or the one that anoints it-- is creepier.

Along the exterior edges of the pool, the Brooklyn Brewery has set up tents, selling local lager by the cup, while women from fellow Brooklyn venue Warsaw (located inside the Polish National Home, which has served as a meeting hall–performance space for north Brooklyn's considerable Polish community for nearly a century and has turned its ﬁrst ﬂoor into a hipster-enticing indie-rock ballroom, complete with colossal oil paintings, Polish and American ﬂags, chandeliers, and a disco ball) dish out kielbasa platters and plates of pierogi, complete with sautéed onions, apple sauce, and sour cream. I am eating a vanilla ice cream cone with chocolate crunchies, bought from a Mister Softee truck parked poolside, and waiting for Iron and Wine to take the stage. Studying the crowd, I check off rote signiﬁers of twentysomething Brooklyn hipsterdom: star tattoos, oversize sunglasses, studded belts, canvas bags with woodland animals (squirrels, deer, and ﬁnches, especially) patched in place, scads of rubber bracelets, American Apparel T-shirts, too much jewelry, choppy haircuts, skinny waists. We all look the same.

Iron and Wine is the pet project of former community college professor Sam Beam, a South Carolina native whose voice still harbors a tiny bit of drawl, even ﬁltered through eight solid inches of beard. Beam recorded his debut album, The Creek Drank the Cradle, on a shoddy four-track in his Miami home (whispering into the microphone, indie legend goes, so as not to wake up his sleeping daughters). Comprised solely of scratchy, barely there vocals, acoustic guitar, and a bit of banjo, The Creek Drank the Cradle is an intensely personal record, tackling faith, ﬁdelity, and human catharsis with urgency. It is the kind of record that gets passed between friends like dog-eared copies of Rilke or Robert Lowell, pressed into hands, slipped into mailboxes, tucked under pillows. It's impossible not to think that we would all be a little better off if it came standard in hotel drawers.

The Creek Drank the Cradle was put out, mostly untouched, by Seattle's famed Sub Pop Records in 2002. (Nirvana released its lo-ﬁ debut, Bleach, on Sub Pop in 1989, initially selling somewhere around six thousand copies-- but Bleach went many times platinum after Nirvana's major label breakthrough, Nevermind, ushered in a ﬂannel-shirted revolution, inadvertently making Sub Pop America's most prominent-- and probably wealthiest-- independent record label, 49 percent of which is now controlled by Warner Bros.) The record was instantly adopted by indie-rock fans, mostly because it was so easy to be tugged into the quasiescapist, heavily idealized portrait of Beam-as-basement-troubadour-- a bearded, southern father of two with a cardboard box full of shitty equipment and an unassuming shoulder shrug. Listening to The Creek Drank the Cradle felt like accidentally digging up a diamond, clutching it brieﬂy in a soil-streaked palm, and then shoving it deep into your front pocket, eyes shooting around suspiciously. Nobody who found it could ever believe their luck. The vague sense that the composition and realization of Creek were just as unexpected and accidental as the record's eventual celebration lent Beam's work an edge of serendipity. Which seems especially profound (and jarring) in the face of all this hipster ornament.

Beam followed up his debut with a string of increasingly betterrecorded, slightly more raucous releases, beginning with 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days. Now, when Iron and Wine tours, Beam plays rock clubs, not coffeehouses, threading his dulcet murmurs through giant, buzzing stacks of speakers, shot into sticky black boxes with NOFX stickers plastered to the ﬂoor, long frozen in place by hundreds of coats of beer-and-spit shellac. In its truest forms, folk music has always been progressive, audacious, fearless-- and when Beam shufﬂes onstage, commanding reverent silence in a room better known for ﬁst-pumping and beer-hollering, his moves are just as brave, just as revolutionary.

The last time I saw Iron and Wine perform, following the release of 2005's Woman King EP and In the Reins, a collaboration with Arizona's mariachi-infused folk-rockers Calexico, his set was largely electric, and Beam's signature hush had been exchanged for a thin, clear yelp. Although his electric presentation was rich and complete, it also felt protected and distant, insulated from the audience by towers of ampliﬁers and speakers. Looking around at all the sloping concrete, empty space, and open air, I'm presuming that Beam will be plugged in tonight, too, and I think about how in some ways, going louder is also a way of pulling back.

Chicago's Califone is opening for Iron and Wine tonight, and they amble onstage to light applause. Formed by Tim Rutili in the late 1990s as an antidote to Red Red Meat, Rutili's previous (and heavily experimental) band, Califone has since produced eight long-players, each with a slightly different lineup of musicians. Listening to Califone's sweaty, blues-heavy scrap-rock is not an entirely stable sensory experience: devious, fertile, and dangerously pretty, it sounds as futuristic as it does ancient, synthesizing mountain and Delta traditions with contemporary technology, marrying organic instruments with otherworldly blips-- and reimagining Americana for a nation more reliant on machines than the grace of God. Lyrically, the frontman Tim Rutili favors tiny vignettes over narrative arcs, and his songs usually read more like prose poems than stories-- which, given the hyperfragmented sound-collage of Califone's instrumentation (banjos and synthesizers, acoustic guitars and loops of found sound), makes a certain kind of sense. The disparity of sounds feels broken, nonlinear, and imagistic.

Months later, when I talk to Califone about its music, we're crouched in the basement of Brooklyn's Southpaw, where the band is scheduled to perform a sold-out show, their second in as many nights. "It's all instinct," Rutili says, explaining his band's distinctive clatter. "There's not a lot of talk about theory or anything."

Rutili and bandmate Jim Becker, who plays banjo and violin, certainly consider early Americana records an inﬂuence, although they're more interested in recreating the intangible grit and grain of rural music, rather than mimicking its sound. "I remember when I ﬁrst heard Robert Johnson-- it blew my head off," Rutili says. "The way we use that old stuff in Califone is more as a texture-- a feel that we tried to lift. It's hard to relate to [on a literal level] because it's not 1912."

Both Rutili and Becker are well versed in early American folk and blues. "When people ask me ‘So, what were your favorite recordings of this year?' it's all ﬁddle music from the 1920s and 30s. Mississippi string band music-- that's just from outer space-- it's great. North Carolina, West Virginia ﬁddlers-- I've had the opportunity to play with some of these guys. I've always listened to country blues, ﬁfe and drum, Cajun music. It's endless." Becker nods.

"When I was like, seventeen, in high school, I used to go to the Town Hall pub and play open mics," Rutili recounts. "And there was a woman there, she was maybe 50 years old, and I started dating her daughter. But the mom had a record collection that fucking killed me. That's where I ﬁrst heard the Harry Smith folk anthology. She was from that generation, she had all those records...and I was thinking, OK, I really like this part of it, but I really like Black Flag a lot, too, and I really like Hüsker Dü. But that stuff always stayed with me, so it's interesting to hear [newer, younger artists] discovering that stuff now," Rutili explains. "The thing about those old records," he continues, "is the way [they were] recorded with one microphone-- the scratches, hearing someone's foot tapping on the ground. I think to approach those songs you need to use your own aesthetic to destroy them. And that's the thing about the people doing folk music now-- they're trying to make records that sound as if they were made in the 1960s. And in a lot of ways I love it, but there's something to be said for originality-- to take those things and put it through your own ﬁlter, and not be slavishly devoted to that one sound."

Tonight at McCarren Park, Califone rolls through tracks from their most recent release, Roots and Crowns; the crowd is appreciative, but Califone seems better suited for a smaller, more intimate venue, where their twitters and gasps are more audible. Here, every chord and shout ﬁghts for ear-space with casual conversation, beer lines, and bloggers scrolling through their digital cameras, comparing photographs. By the time Sam Beam walks onstage, the crowd is thicker, the sun is dipping below the horizon, and everyone seems better prepared to stand still and listen to songs. Beam, joined by a full band (including his sister on backing vocals), plays a mostly plugged-in set, save a handful of acoustic cuts, and the crowd grows weirdly rowdy, screaming incomprehensible requests at the stage. This is not the folk show of yesteryear.

Beam is part of a new-- if difﬁcult to effectively delineate-movement in folk music. In the last decade and a half, a slew of avantfolk players have inched into the indie-rock market, nudging aside power-pop trios and noise ensembles to make quiet, meditative acoustic music as much a part of the indie aesthetic as Converse sneakers. Starting in New York in the mid-1980s with anti-folk-- a punk-folk hybrid that mocked the mushiness of 1960s folk revivalists, revving up folksy songs with snotty asides and irreverent lyrics-- and continuing through myriad permutations, folk music has been consistently reimagined for younger, hipper audiences.

In August 2003, the UK music magazine The Wire published a cover story titled "Welcome to the New Weird America", wherein the Scottish scribe David Keenan jets to Brattleboro, Vermont, to detail "a groundswell musical movement" drawing on "an intoxicating range of avant garde sounds, from acoustic roots to drone, ritualistic performance, Krautrock, ecstatic jazz, hillbilly mountain music, psychedelia, archival blues and folk sides, Country funk, and more." Keenan attends the Brattleboro Free Folk Festival, organized by Matt Valentine (who currently performs with Erika Elder as half of MV & EE with the Bummer Road and is generally considered the founding father of the east coast arm of the free-folk movement), and speaks with festival performers, trying his best to isolate and describe the heartbeats behind this new, beguiling strain of American folk music.

Following Keenan's article, most of the artists and albums included in his piece were tucked under the umbrella of "New Weird America," which ﬂowed into the slightly more descriptive "free-folk," which became "freak-folk," and subsequently devolved, as more and more diverse artists were swept up in the wave, into the catchall "indie-folk"-- even though the differences between psych-infused free-folk like MV & EE and acoustic indie-folk like Iron and Wine generally seem profound enough to warrant at least two distinct, hyphenated preﬁxes.

In his article, Keenan talks about how contemporary free-folk artists are writing an "alternative American narrative," which makes sense, seeing as how this particular branch of American folk is, in some ways, antithetical to its predecessors. Although most free-folkers cite early American folk and blues among their most signiﬁcant inﬂuences, the genre is largely experimental: its melodies and narratives operate outside of standard folk paradigms and its stories are not linear or universal in a way that's immediately self-evident, making the music feel, at times, inaccessible. The songs are often unstructured and long (think Grateful Dead meets Captain Beefheart) and thus less likely to be repeated around a campﬁre or sung to children. Meanwhile, their creators are intellectual eccentrics, removed from the working-class everyman-ness of more "down-home" acts like the Carter Family or Woody Guthrie.

Still, these songs and records are concerned with social change, created without much commercial ambition (releases are often hand-pressed in limited numbers), and facilitate a sense of community (plenty of free-folk artists seem to record and play mostly for one another, self-referentially, collaboratively, and, in some cases, exclusively). There is also a New Age–retro-hippie mysticism inherent to free-folk that, while inviting ridicule from plenty, harkens back to (as Keenan points out) the metaphysical mystery of Harry Smith's Celestial Monochord. And although free-folkers' unchained, improvised noodling and stream-of consciousness structure doesn't lead to songs that sound like traditional folk songs, there is a common element of total spontaneity and truth: as Keenan writes, "they have stripped improvisation of its jazz-informed reputation as a cerebral discipline and rebirthed it as the original, primal musical gesture, reminding it that it was always folk music's most natural mode of expression."

Free-folk is also heavily inﬂuenced by British folksingers from the latter half of the twentieth century, mirroring, however inadvertently, the exact origins of all American folk music, which itself was inspired by Celtic, Scottish, and English folk songs in the early 1800s. British bands and artists like Bert Jansch and Pentangle, Comus, Shirley Collins, the Incredible String Band, Donovan, Vashti Bunyan, Fairport Convention, Roy Harper, and loads of others peaked in Britain in the 1960s and '70s, cranking out high, disorienting songs, marked mainly by the ways in which they weaved ancient Celtic traditions with world music ﬂourishes (the Incredible String Band incorporated Middle Eastern instruments like sitar, oud, and tamboura), or added elements of jazz, progressive rock, psychedelia, and, occasionally, earlier California alt-country (think Gram Parsons–era Byrds). The resulting records were both traditional and strange, highly stylized, and consumed, for the most part, by niche rock fans and never folk music purists.

But ultimately, free-folk is as equally inspired by early Americana as it is by modern British folk, and the genre pays considerable homage to Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music in particular. The former musician–music journalist–music executive Howard Wuelﬁng, who operates the public relations company Howlin Wuelf Media and represents the majority of emerging free-folk artists, emphasizes the Anthology's inﬂuence on his clients' sound: "Its CD release in the nineties was vastly inﬂuential on the new generation of folks turned on by the Old, Weird America. But I'd say that different artists working in this sort of music draw on different percentages of [British and American folk], varying from artist to artist. Just as important, [free-folk artists] are also inﬂuenced by [contemporary] avant-garde musicians like Current 93's David Tibet and Genesis P-Orridge's later work with Psychic TV, not to mention a whole generation of quirky American singer-songwriters from the late sixties, like Biff Rose, Linda Perhacs, Jesse Winchester, Ruthann Friedman, Michael Hurley, Karen Dalton, Randy Newman, Van Dyke Parks, and others."

Free-folk is also sold (when it's sold at all) to fans of avant-garde or experimental music (Wuelﬁng describes his target audience as "people who are attracted to innovation and the unusual") and, with its meandering structure, unrecognizable instrumentation, and jam-band atmospherics, would likely seem wholly foreign to most Ramblin' Jack Elliott fans.

Regardless, the genre is gaining in commercial viability: in the early 1990s, Will Oldham, a singer-songwriter from Louisville, Kentucky, began recording bleak, folk-tinged music under various guises, most fronted by the word Palace (see Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Palace Songs, or just Palace), before releasing one full-length and two EPs under his given name and a slew of records as confounding alter-ego Bonnie ‘Prince' Billy. Oldham's dark (and occasionally bizarre) records earned him considerable underground success and proved that indie-folk could be perverse and emotional at the same time. Oldham's songs, much like Califone's or Freakwater's, are a mishmash of broad American inﬂuences, pulling in and synthesizing everything from punk to blues to folk to classic country (in 2000, an aging Johnny Cash even recorded a duet with Oldham-- a cover of Oldham's chilling "I See a Darkness"-- for one of Cash's Rick Rubin–produced comeback albums, American III: Solitary Man). Oldham rarely gives interviews, but in 2002 he endeavored to explain his sound to the UK newspaper The Observer: "Too much emphasis is put on American roots music when people try and place me," Oldham insisted. "You know, I grew up listening to punk: Hüsker Dü, Dinosaur Jr. I'm steeped in a lot of stuff. Led Zeppelin as much as Bukka White. Miles Davis as much as Merle Haggard. It all goes in and some of it stays there, and some of it comes back out."

In 2002, Devendra Banhart, a Texas-born folksinger raised in Venezuela, released his debut, Oh Me Oh My..., on Young God Records, an independent label founded by Michael Gira, formerly of acclaimed experimental rock band Swans. Oh Me Oh My... laid the groundwork for Banhart's sophomore breakthrough, 2004's Rejoicing in the Hands, a collection of beguiling acoustic songs, each anchored by Banhart's otherworldly falsetto (eerily reminiscent of Emmett Miller and John Jacob Niles) and fairy-tale lyrics. Banhart is an unabashed disciple of modern British folk: he recently trilled on former Pentangle frontman Bert Jansch's solo record, The Black Swan, Vashti Bunyan sings on Rejoicing, and Banhart appears on Bunyan's latest, Lookaftering (if one is predisposed to believe Internet rumors, Banhart also writes Bunyan's name on his arm before every show). But in many ways, Banhart's creaky, whimsical folk songs seem just as informed by the wily antics of Woody Guthrie and, later, Bob Dylan.

Around the same time Banhart began slinking onto college radio charts, Joanna Newsom, a California-born, classically trained harpist, released her debut, The Milk-Eyed Mender, on Chicago's Drag City Records (following a successful tour with fellow Drag City–signee Will Oldham). Newsom's chirpy, overarticulated vocals were an enticing accompaniment to the record's sparkling melodies, and Newsom became an underground pop star of sorts. Other bands and artists, with notably diverse approaches to the free-folk sound-- see Coco Rosie, Vetiver, Six Organs of Admittance, No-Neck Blues Band, P.G. Six, Sunburned Hand of the Man, Dredd Foole, White Magic, Wooden Wand and the Vanishing Voice, Faun Fables, Animal Collective, Espers-- promptly followed, united, at times, by only the fanciful capriciousness of their names.

The relatively elevated proﬁle of free-folk owes a considerable amount to the viability and visibility of indie-folk musicians like Banhart, Newsom, Oldham, and Beam, who, despite being far from the mainstream, represent the more commercial end of the sound. Free-folk was emerging as a valid (if still slightly confused) subgenre of independent rock, and it wasn't terribly long before journalists began trying to nail down the speciﬁcs of the movement. In a 2004 article for The New York Times, Alec Hanley Bemis deﬁnes Banhart, Newsom, and their peers as being part of "a highly idealistic pack of young musicians whose music is quiet, soothing, and childlike, their lyrics fantastic, surreal, and free of the slightest trace of irony." Two years later, the Times published another story about the phenomenon, this time by the music critic Will Hermes, who declared free-folk "one of the most creatively vigorous strains of underground music." In 2005, the San Francisco Chronicle called free-folk's primary players "the new ﬂower children," citing inﬂuences ranging from "the British Isles folk of Davey Graham, Bert Jansch, and just about anything produced by Joe Boyd, through the Delta and country blues of Lead Belly and Reverend Gary Davis to Fred Neil's bluesy folk-jazz and Tim Buckley's rococo improv-folk-rock." Later that year, the British author Simon Reynolds was more skeptical (and I suspect his prose is tongue-in-cheek), writing about the movement in The Village Voice: "These tracks either dissipate into oxbow lakes of abstraction or gradually accumulate disparate jetsom [sic] into tripnotic juggernauts...the only truly folky aspect is a slight bias toward sounds of acoustic provenance."

While the indie/free-folk scene can hardly be called cohesive (unlike crunk or grunge or, say, New York punk, it's not geographically determined, which makes it far more difﬁcult to demarcate), there are still enough connections and cross-references to build a pretty decent colorcoded map. Aside from squabbling over the last dented Fender Rhodes at the local Salvation Army, indie/free-folk artists tend to share producers, labels, friends, tours (Devendra Banhart thanked Beam in the liner notes to his third full-length, Nino Rojo, even though at the time of the record's release, they had never met). Old or new, folk is, after all, still an exercise in community. And even though indie/free-folk isn't geographically based in any real, encompassing sense, a few distinct communities-- San Francisco, Chicago, Brooklyn-- do exist. I'm most compelled by the homespun scene Keenan inﬁltrated, in the areas surrounding Brattleboro, Vermont. It's where the term free-folk ﬁrst came into use, when Matt Valentine orchestrated the ﬁrst (and, so far, last) Brattleboro Free Folk Festival in May 2003.

Brattleboro is tucked in the southeastern corner of the state, in a green, brambly valley between the Connecticut and West Rivers, and is best known for its kayaking, ice skating, art galleries, and the fact that public nudity, if not "done to promote sexual gratiﬁcation," is entirely legal within its borders. When I chug up Main Street and into town, arriving slightly after midnight on a blustery mid-January Friday, the air temperature is hovering around seven degrees, and no one appears to be capitalizing on the city's relaxed notions regarding nakedness. Streets are barren, dusted with snow, and dark. I've rented the only room at the Artist's Loft, a local art gallery topped by a two-room apartment and leased to out-of-towners by the weekend. I park, tug my wool hat down over my ears, grab my duffel bag, and sprint upstairs. The interior of the loft is decorated with classic Vermont kitsch: loads of oil paintings and watercolors, stacks of books, a blanket with cross-stitched pictures of herbs, a library of VHS tapes, quilts, a shelf full of mugs, a crystal punch bowl with eight glasses, a water pitcher shaped like a toad, a lamp made out of a clarinet, baskets, pillows, ceramic bowls, and, on a shelf overlooking the bed, a series of nesting Russian dolls. The bathroom features a ﬂamingo shower curtain and a collection of antique wooden combs, culled from a variety of global cultures. The living room window looks out over the frozen Connecticut River. Periodically, throughout the night, freight trains roar past, horns blasting to scatter, I'm told, vagrants and cats; I'm fairly certain I don't get more than 10 consecutive minutes of sleep before the sun rises and sharp, white light starts beaming through the windows. It is a cold and unforgiving morning.